Ziyaad Mia

Ziyaad Mia is a Toronto lawyer active in human rights, national security, animal welfare and civic issues. He is also an adjunct professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. Ziyaad is the founder of Give 30, which is an innovative Ramadan-based social initiative designed to mobilize people of all faiths and moral persuasions on a grassroots level in the fight against hunger.

Canada has a new government with a markedly different tone. Gone are the cardboard villains and divisive rhetoric. Despite voting for it, prime minister Trudeau promised that C-51 would be amended. However, because C-51 is deeply flawed the best approach is to scrap the legislation and start fresh.

The word "chicken" has become the name of a product rather than that of an animal. Nearly all North American chickens are raised and slaughtered in industrial operations. Most chickens raised for meat are engineered to grow rapidly in crowded barns with tens of thousands of other birds. The virtual hell created for tens of billions of animals by factory farming is one of the greatest moral issues of our time. Positive change requires us to take animal interests seriously in the all the choices we make, as consumers, citizens and human beings.

In the annals of human evil, Rwanda's genocide takes a special place. With a kill rate of about six people a minute for more than three months, it's likely one of the fastest mass slaughters of humans in history. Most were hacked to death by machete, partly because the perpetrators found it cheaper than using bullets.

It's time to rethink our relationship with animals. We can begin by demanding effective laws from our governments guaranteeing the Five Freedoms for all animals in Canada. By doing this, animals may begin to become visible to us; they may matter.

Give 30 is an initiative established in 2012, tapping into Ramadan's lessons on social solidarity, to mobilize everyone -- regardless of faith or background -- to address the challenges of hunger in our society. Hunger in Canada is not an issue of food scarcity. Rather, it is directly related to income sufficiency and security.

Our government may say that we're engaging the Saudis to foster reform in the kingdom. Apartheid South Africa's allies made similar arguments, calling for "constructive engagement" with the racist regime. Thankfully, Canada rejected that approach and led the world on sanctions, which hastened the end of apartheid.

Recently CTV's W5 aired an episode called "Food for Thought." The video shows pigs with open wounds living confined in tight gestation stalls, piglets being castrated without anesthetic and piglets killed with blunt force trauma. The hard truth is that much of what the video reveals is likely standard industry practice and not in violation of federal or provincial law.